Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (Morreal)

Areas for Discussion, Chapters 1 & 2

Negative thoughts of and oppositions to humor (Biblical, classical, early Christian), especially Plato and Thomas Hobbes

Defenses of Humor, esp. Aristotle and Thomas Acquinas

The Enlightenment and Humor

The Superiority Theory, advocates, viewpoints, and flaws

The Incongruity Theory, advocates, viewpoints, and flaws

The Relief Theory, advocates, viewpoints, and flaws

Cognitive Dissonance

The Relaxation Theory, advocates, viewpoints, and flaws

Amusement Versus Emotion

Humor as Play, and Laughter as Play Signals

Why Do People Laugh?

Laughter is part of the universal human vocabulary. All members of the human species understand it. Unlike English or French or Swahili, we don’t have to learn to speak it. We’re born with the capacity to laugh.

One of the remarkable things about laughter is that it occurs unconsciously. You don’t decide to do it. While we can consciously inhibit it, we don’t consciously produce laughter. That’s why it’s very hard to laugh on command or to fake laughter. (Don’t take my word for it: Ask a friend to laugh on the spot.)

Laughter provides powerful, uncensored insights into our unconscious. It simply bubbles up from within us in certain situations.

Very little is known about the specific brain mechanisms responsible for laughter. But we do know that laughter is triggered by many sensations and thoughts, and that it activates many parts of the body.

When we laugh, we alter our facial expressions and make sounds. During exuberant laughter, the muscles of the arms, legs and trunk are involved. Laughter also requires modification in our pattern of breathing.

We also know that laughter is a message that we send to other people. We know this because we rarely laugh when we are alone (we laugh to ourselves even less than we talk to ourselves).

Laughter is social and contagious. We laugh at the sound of laughter itself. That’s why the Tickle Me Elmo doll is such a success — it makes us laugh and smile.

The first laughter appears at about 3.5 to 4 months of age, long before we’re able to speak. Laughter, like crying, is a way for a preverbal infant to interact with the mother and other caregivers.

An evolutionary perspective
We believe laughter evolved from the panting behavior of our ancient primate ancestors. Today, if we tickle chimps or gorillas, they don’t laugh “ha ha ha” but exhibit a panting sound. That’s the sound of ape laughter. And it’s the root of human laughter.

Apes laugh in conditions in which human laughter is produced, like tickle, rough and tumble play, and chasing games. Other animals produce vocalizations during play, but they are so different that it’s difficult to equate them with laughter. Rats, for example, produce high-pitch vocalizations during play and when tickled. But it’s very different in sound from human laughter.

When we laugh, we’re often communicating playful intent. So laughter has a bonding function within individuals in a group. It’s often positive, but it can be negative too. There’s a difference between “laughing with” and “laughing at.” People who laugh at others may be trying to force them to conform or casting them out of the group.

No one has actually counted how much people of different ages laugh, but young children probably laugh the most. At ages 5 and 6, we tend to see the most exuberant laughs. Adults laugh less than children, probably because they play less. And laughter is associated with play.

We have learned a lot about when and why we laugh, much of it counter-intuitive. Work now underway will tell us more about the brain mechanisms of laughter, how laughter has evolved and why we’re so susceptible to tickling — one of the most enigmatic of human behaviors.

Robert Provine, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is completing a book entitled “Laughter” that is scheduled to be published this fall by Little, Brown and Company.

Why Laugh?

Laughter is an emotional release similar to crying, brought upon by a mild mental stress rather than an emotional stress. It happens when the mind has some notion of an expectation and then that expectation is replaced by something similar but different and unexpected.

From sudden emotion created by humorous activities performed by others or by themselves.

When they're happy and feeling good.

Sometimes to prevent crying.

Someone tickled them.

It feels good to laugh.

Laughter is good for our lungs as an outlet for some extra energy. We use 17 different muscles to smile and 43 different muscles to frown, so it's easier to smile than frown.

Laughing also adds days to our lives. However, crying lessens our lives.

Laughing could also be bad, because you might get bad luck.

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_do_people_laugh#ixzz24lxz3ivW

Why do we laugh? The reasons we laugh, including "contagious" laughter, may be products of evolution. Natural laughter is a two-part, spontaneous, response to humor, that has physiological, psychological, and physical benefits. Most agree that we laugh when we find something to be humorous, yet different reasons exist for what we find to be humorous. Additionally, different things are humorous to us at different stages of life. Laughter, a physiological response to humor, can be broken down into two parts. The first is a set of gestures, and the second is the production of sound. The brain forces to conduct both responses simultaneously. From a physiological standpoint, a "sensor" in the brain responds to laughter by triggering other neural circuits in the brain, which, in turn, generate more laughter. Oddly enough, laughter is an orderly response, and almost occurs "spontaneously" during pauses at the end of phrases, earning it the name the punctuation effect. Human beings are the only species capable of laughter, and the average adult does so approximately 17 times per day. Good health is one of the many benefits of laughter. Laughter reduces our stress levels by reducing the level of stress hormones, and also helps us cope with serious illnesses. Physiologically, laughter promotes healing, by lowering the blood pressure, and by increasing the vascular blood flow and the oxygenation of the blood. Physical fitness stemming from laughter is a benefit known to few. Scientists estimate that laughing 100 times is equivalent to a 10-minute workout on a rowing machine, or to 15 minutes on a stationary exercise bike. The mere act of laughing exercises the diaphragm, as well as the abdominal, respiratory, facial, leg, and back muscles. Another benefit of laughter is that it improves our over-all mental health. Pent up negative emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness, can cause biochemical changes in our bodies that can produce a harmful effect. Laughter provides a harmless outlet for these negative emotions, and provides a coping mechanism for dealing with difficult or stressful situations.

“What Is Literature?”

from Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

There have been various attempts to define literature. You can define, for example, as ‘imaginative’ writing in the sense of fiction—writing which is not necessarily true

[But] a distinction between ‘fact’ and fiction,’ then, seems unlikely to get us very far.

Novels and news reports are neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our own sharp distinctions between these categories simply do not apply.

Superman comics are fictional but not generally regarded as literature, and certainly not as Literature.

Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether. Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or imaginative, but because it uses language in peculiar ways.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language . . . If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Literary discourse estranges and alienates ordinary speech, but in doing so, paradoxically, brings us into a fuller, more intimate possession of experience.

The idea that there is a single “normal” language, a common currency shared equally by all members of society is an illusion. Any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, differentiated according to class, region, gender, status, and so on.

The context [of reading] tells me that it is literary, but the language itself has no inherent properties or qualities which might distinguish it from other kinds of discourse.

This focusing on the way of talking, rather than on the reality of what is talked about, is sometimes taken to indicate that we mean by literature a kind of self-referential language, a language which talks about itself [draws attention to itself].

In this sense, once can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing.

There is no essence of literature whatsoever.

Perhaps literature means . . . any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly.

Literature is in this sense a purely formal, empty sort of definition.

The suggestion that literature is a highly valued kind of writing is an illuminating one. But it has one fairly devastating consequence. It means that we can drop once and for all the illusion that the category “literature” is objective, in the sense of being eternally given and immutable. Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature—Shakespeare, for example—can cease to be literature.

The reason why it follows from the definition of literature s highly valued writing that it is not a stable entity is that value-judgments are notoriously variable.

The so-called “literary canon,” the unquestioned “great tradition” of the “national literature,” has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time.

Value is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by a certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in light of given purposes. It is thus quite possible that, given a deep transformation in our history, we may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare . . . In such a situation Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti.

We always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns.

Different historical periods have constructed a “different” Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or devalue, though not necessarily the same ones. All literary works, in other words, are “rewritten,” if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them” indeed there is no reading of a work that is not also a “re-writing.”

What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgments by which it is constituted are historically variable, but also that these value-judgments have themselves close relation to social ideologies